YouTube Ups Quota for New Developers, Leaves Microsoft Out In Cold

So long as your name isn’t Microsoft, YouTube wants to make it easier for you to develop apps that integrate YouTube videos. On Friday, YouTube significantly increased the allowable quota for its Data API. The move comes one week after the video service blocked Microsoft from relaunching its Windows Phone YouTube app.

YouTube's Data API lets you incorporate YouTube functions into your own apps. It lets you fetch search results and retrieve, insert, update and delete videos and playlists. Combined with the YouTube Player API and Analytics API, the Data API gives you a full YouTube experience.

To protects its servers from excessive traffic, YouTube uses a quota system. Recent changes mean now you can download 50 million units per day as opposed to 5 million. YouTube also reduced the cost of uploading a new video from 16,000 to 1,600 units. In real world numbers that means you can now upload 30,000 videos per day, whereas in the past, you could only upload 300.

YouTube hopes the change will inspire developers to use its API in creative and innovative ways. “Go out there and build some great apps that make use of that extra quota!” The company wrote in a blog post.

Microsoft, on the other hand, won’t be able to make use of any YouTube quota. Recently YouTube blocked Microsoft from relaunching its YouTube Windows Phone app. YouTube stated it did so because Microsoft was supposed to build the app in HTML5 but didn’t.

After being blocked, Microsoft responded with a lengthy retort in effect saying YouTube is making up reasons out of the blue because it simply doesn’t want Microsoft to have a YouTube app for Windows Phone in the first place.

If you want to gather more details on the bickering between YouTube and Microsoft, Verge wrote a great article on it.